The Tender Hour of Twilight

by Richard Seaver

  “And we’re about ready with the material for issue number two,” Alex was saying.

  “Excellent,” said Lebon. “Have you brought the manuscript with you?”

  “Not today,” Alex said. “We thought we should discuss various matters first.”

  “Such as?”

  I exchanged glances with Jane and thought I detected a like frown of concern on her forehead.

  “Schedule,” Alex said, and I saw le patron visibly relax. “Payment terms.” And, visibly, he stiffened.

  “You mentioned a schedule of September fifteenth,” Lebon said, “and if you deliver the manuscript this week—or even next—that we can comfortably meet. As for payment, I assume Monsieur Lougee—a solid French name, no doubt—will be guaranteeing the bill as before.”

  Prior to meeting with Lebon, Alex, Jane, and I had discussed the matter of total honesty. “Candor” was the word I believe was bandied about. Should we or shouldn’t we level with him, namely, that this time Papa wouldn’t be footing the bill, we would.

  “Don’t be daft,” Alex said, “of course we don’t tell him. We’ve got his confidence now. He probably won’t even ask about payment.”

  “I’m not so sure,” Jane murmured. “He wanted Father to pay the full amount up front.”

  We had quickly calculated that with the savings Jane and Alex were making by moving out of the Hôtel Verneuil, living on only half of her father’s monthly allowance, plus my own meager savings from having moved into the rue du Sabot rent-free, we could come up with roughly half the payment for issue number 2. “Half down and half on delivery, that sounds fair and reasonable to me,” Alex concluded. “Who could refuse that?”

  “We will bring you the first half tomorrow,” Trocchi went on. “A hundred fifty thousand francs. Cash. We very much want to stay with you,” he went on, “but you must be reasonable with us as well.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lebon said. “I like to help young people, worthy endeavors. I, and my father before me, already have, as I said. But with those earlier American and British magazines, people always paid in advance. It was a rule they accepted and honored.”

  Alex shook his head. “I think you’re making a mistake, monsieur, a grave mistake.”

  “Unless,” Lebon tried, “Monsieur Lougee could guarantee the second-half payment.”

  “Perhaps,” Alex said, “perhaps. We’ll let you know tomorrow.”

  * * *

  Outside, the pounding of the Mazarine presses fast becoming a fading memory, we repaired to one of the outdoor cafés at the nearby carrefour de Buci, bustling as always at this time of day, even in midsummer, awash with vendors crying their wares and black-clad women jostling with their market baskets and fondling the ripe, plump vegetables and fruits. The heady odor of the open street market—a mixture of piquant spices and crushed garlic, of frites frying merrily on the corner, of wine gurgling from huge casks into the empty bottles proffered by the soon-to-be thirsty, of meat cooking in the restaurant next door, of fresh-baked baguettes—reminded us how close France was to recovering its prewar culinary splendor. It also reminded us how desperately hungry we were.

  “So where does that leave us?” I said. “I don’t see any way we can raise the full amount he wants. And we’re running out of time.”

  Jane looked glum. Hitting up Daddy was out of the question.

  “Don’t worry,” Alex said, “I have another printer all lined up.”

  We waited.

  “Fontenay-aux-Roses,” he continued enigmatically. “Name mean anything to you?”

  “A Paris suburb, no?” I ventured, trying unsuccessfully to place it in the periphery: Neuilly? Issy-les-Moulineaux? Montreuil? Boulogne-Billancourt? So many suburbs, so little concrete knowledge of the world beyond the Left Bank. Even after four years. I made a resolution to explore the area sometime in the near future: the proche banlieue.

  “You all make fun of my pinball prowess,” Alex said. “Well, at the Mabillon the other day I was hard at it, racking up the best score of my life, when this man saunters over, clearly impressed, watches me finish the game, then challenges me to a match. Great big guy. Towers over me. An ox—a bull, rather. Anyway, to make a long story short, he wipes me out. Truly impressive body moves. After which he of course invites me for a beer, asks me what I do, and so forth. When I pull out a copy of Merlin, he laughs out loud. ‘What’s so funny?’ I ask him. ‘Fate,’ he says, ‘I believe in fate…’

  “Turns out he’s a printer.” Alex pulled out his wallet, rummaged through it, and finally came up with a crumpled but still readable business card:

  JEAN-LOUIS LECONTE

  GÉRANT

  IMPRIMERIE DE LA S.A.I.B.E.L. FONTENAY-AUX-ROSES (SEINE)

  Monsieur Jean-Louis Leconte was, as Alex had described, a tall, strapping man. Though he was grizzled, I judged him to be only in his mid- to late thirties. I had met a number of Frenchmen over the previous four years who at first glance looked middle-aged—faces etched with deep lines, hair prematurely gray, shoulders slightly stooped—and inevitably each had a war story that explained the aging. Something we Americans had trouble understanding, even those who had known battle during the war. It was not just stress. It was a matter of duration. Four long years of occupation, of never knowing, each time you left your house, whether you would ever return, of living in constant fear of the knock on the door at 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. or a simple rafle, a roundup in a public place by the German SD or their Gallic lackeys, the equally dreaded milice. Even if you were innocent of any crime, you could be arrested and whisked away to Drancy or some other staging area. A jealous colleague, a slighted concierge, a jilted lover, had only to write an anonymous letter or make a nameless phone call.

  If the war had turned Leconte’s hair gray, there was no sign his body had suffered. He looked in the peak of condition. I wondered if he might not be one of Maurice Goudeket’s wrestlers, though I had never seen him in the gym with the other Olympic wrestling hopefuls with whom for several months I had been working out, trying to adapt my American college wrestling skills to the lutte gréco-romaine that prevailed here. I was improving, I kept telling myself. It was taking longer every month for the French grapplers to pin me, which I construed as progress. The hardest thing for an American wrestler here was not to let the shoulders touch the mat for even a split second. In college, you had to hold your opponent’s shoulders to the mat for a full three seconds to end the match. Here it was only the time it took for the referee to count vingt-et-un, vingt-deux, barely a second, and you were toast. Of course, it worked both ways: you just needed to twist your opponent in such a way that his shoulders grazed the mat, and he was gone. What’s more, if one wrestler in gréco-romaine gained a six-point lead, the match was over, whereas in American collegiate wrestling many a man behind by ten points suddenly pinned his opponent in the last thirty seconds. It meant throwing every move and combination learned over a decade out the window and starting from scratch. I wondered how my charges at Pomfret School were doing, those I had left behind in a fledgling wrestling program when I hied myself off to Paris. And if ever I were to return, would I know how to coach freestyle again, or only gréco-romaine? Fleeting thoughts, begotten by the towering presence of our new printer.

  His biceps, I noted, were roughly the size of my thighs, but it was not till he stood up that I realized the full extent of our potential problem: he was a good three inches taller than Trocchi’s six feet two and had to weigh close to 250. Muscle-to-fat ratio: disconcerting. Whoever said the two world wars had sapped France of all its virility, leaving a nation of ninnies and the physically inept, had clearly never met Monsieur Leconte.

  “Why didn’t you pick a printer five feet five?” I muttered to Trocchi in English. “This guy looks like he could snap both our necks with one hand and toss our limp remains in the Seine.”

  “Don’t worry,” Alex said, “I have him in the palm of my hand.”

  Monsieur Leconte assured us that even with the
place closed for part of August, he could meet our September 15 deadline if he had all the material in two weeks. That would give him time to typeset the issue before closing, and we could return the corrected proofs the first of September.

  We shook hands all around. I had always thought I had a pretty solid grip, but when Leconte’s hand encircled mine, I was Jack and he the giant.

  Outside, we exchanged not a word until we were safely on the train. At which point we gave each other the 1952 equivalent of a high five and burst out laughing.

  “What did I tell you?” Alex said, beaming.

  “I have to hand it to you,” I admitted. “And I swear I’ll never bug you again about playing that goddamn pinball machine. There’s only one thing…”

  Alex sighed. “I hear a negative looming.”

  “Simply a question, nothing more. A simple pragmatic question.”

  “Namely?”

  “Given the size, weight, and girth of torso and limb of our new printer, what happens if, come September 15, we can’t come up with the second half of the payment?”

  “Pish and bother,” Trocchi responded derisively. “That, my dear Seaver, is a bridge we cross when we come to it.”

  * * *

  Patrick was only vaguely interested in the finances of the enterprise, Christopher the falconer not at all. So Alex, Jane, and I sat down the next afternoon at the terrace of the Royal, pencil and paper in hand. Roughly 300,000 francs remained of Arthur Fogg Lougee’s beneficence—$750. The printer needed 150,000 by mid-September—I speak of old francs, of course, of that postwar period when anyone with a decent job was a multimillionaire (in francs)—leaving Alex and Jane, if they funded the number from their personal kitty, $375 to live on for the next three months. Jane, usually imperturbable, seemed momentarily at a loss. “Can we really make it on $125 a month?” she wondered out loud. Since falling in love with Alex, she had measurably lowered her standard of living. Alex patted her hand reassuringly, but she was not finished. “No, the most we can put up is $150.”

  “Which means we still have to find 90,000 francs in the next three or four weeks,” I said. “Daunting but not impossible.”

  Pooling our resources, including 50 quid that a benevolent relative had just sent Pat and $75 from me, a payment just received from the New York Herald Tribune for an article I had written on the actor Jean Gabin, we arrived at a grand total of 110,000 francs, which seemed a fortune until you divided by the current 400: roughly $275, a pitiful sum in the world’s eyes, but not in postwar France, where the dollar was ace, king, and queen rolled into one. We all agreed to put our share in escrow—that is, in true French fashion, under the mattress, where it would remain inviolate until September 15. The remaining 40,000 francs due our Fontenay-aux-Roses Gargantua were sure to be found. For the next few weeks we would simply tighten our belts a notch. Another notch. Thus reassured, we signaled to the waiter to bring us another round of gros rouge.

  * * *

  When issue number 2 appeared, surprisingly on schedule, all five of us showed up at the office of Monsieur Leconte, on whose desk a dozen copies sat in proud array. Distributing one to each of us, Leconte took one himself, opened it, and, instead of pretending to read, brought it to his nose. It’s true: there’s a wonderful smell to newly printed books that fades within a day or two, which only printers and editors can fully appreciate. We all skimmed the pages: nothing seemed out of place, no blanks where pictures were intended, no missing passages. The black type was sharp and clear. Handshakes all around. I wondered if poor Jane’s dainty right hand would disappear, wrist and all, but Leconte, a true, if gruff, gentleman, only grazed her outstretched fingers.

  He handed us the invoice, duly stamped to make it official, and we in turn handed him the 150,000 francs due, in new, crisp 5,000-franc notes. The day before we had gone to the bank with our collection of badly wrinkled banknotes and exchanged them for these crisp, clean ones. Made a better impression, we all agreed. In any event, Leconte seemed pleased as he counted the stack, only occasionally licking his thumb.

  “Voilà, parfait!” he said, looking up. He signed the invoice, stamped it with a hearty “PAYÉ,” and again we shook hands all around. He hoped we were pleased. We assured him we were and congratulated him on keeping to the difficult schedule. He wished the magazine success and, surprising us for someone so blunt and, from our limited experience, private, started reminiscing about the recent war. I began translating as quickly and accurately as I could.

  “During the war, times were difficult,” he began, “very difficult. We had to decide whether to close our business or print for the Germans. Early after they arrived in Paris, they sent SS people around to all the printers, in July and August, to check out what we were doing, who we were working for—which publishers, magazines, newspapers, private clients. They told us that henceforth we could print nothing without their authorization. Not an invitation, a broadsheet, nothing, under penalty of imprisonment. ‘Collaboration’ is a dirty word today. But it was invented by our leader, Marshal Pétain, a man much revered—don’t forget he was remembered for saving France at Verdun, for defeating these same Germans in World War I—and most Frenchmen felt it was mandatory to continue business as usual. He kept reminding us that, though we had lost the war, the victors had granted the privileged status of having our own government. The other countries did not: they were under the administration of German officials. At first it seemed to make some sense: we had been defeated but, with Pétain as head of government, not dishonored. So for a few weeks we stayed open and fulfilled their demands: posters, official documents, some new magazines the collaborators were concocting. But seeing those swastika-laden documents coming off the presses made us sicker and sicker. Physically ill. So we began talking among ourselves about shutting down. However, to close down meant not only to lose your equipment, which the Germans would impound, but also to fire a dozen workers.

  “We met and discussed the matter as early as October 1940, just four months after the Germans arrived in Paris. And, quite quickly, the decision was to not close down but appear to remain open. Two of our workers were Jewish—which of course the Germans didn’t yet know—and by September it was already clear the Germans would treat our Jews the way they had treated theirs. Or worse. Oddly, it was our non-Jewish workers who were most adamant about not collaborating. So one day we began dismantling the equipment, a piece at a time so no one would notice, and taking it out by night. During the day we were still open, but over the next several weeks we kept taking the presses apart and carting them to safe places in the far suburbs. By early 1941, the Germans had stopped coming personally to deliver their material; they had Frenchmen taking their place. We had the good fortune of having as our contact a member of the Resistance, who covered for us until we were down to one press. Then one night we closed and shuttered the place—the same place where you are sitting now—and the next day we were in business again, but working now for the Resistance, underground. During the next three and a half years we had to move our presses half a dozen times, each time harder, for the German patrols were more and more prevalent. But somehow we managed. And, I am proud to say, we manufactured several thousand—somewhere I have the precise number—perfect ID cards, which I’m sure saved many, many precious lives.

  “And here we are printing for you, the English. What a pleasure after those dark years. You know, before the war we printed some of the literary magazines of the English—not all their issues, but some—so for us your magazine is a kind of continuity.” He paused. “But I spoke too much. I believe I have all your shipping instructions, do I not?”

  Alex assured him he did, and again thanked him for his fine work. Another round of obligatory handshakes, and finally we headed for the door.

  As we emerged onto the street, we all felt not only energized at having brought issue number 2 into the world but also moved. Never judge a printer by his size. Beneath the gnarled oak that was Monsieur Leconte lay a man of princip
le, courage, and, by God, sensitivity.

  Still, I was greatly relieved we had paid the bill in full.

  7

  Waiting for Beckett

  A WEEK OR SO LATER, I penned the following note to Beckett:

  Dear Mr. Beckett:

  Enclosed please find a copy of the second issue of Merlin, an English-language quarterly printed in Paris. On page 73 you will find a brief essay on your work, which I have recently discovered and admire greatly. I am the first to realize how tentative and inadequate the piece is, for I know I have only begun to plumb the depths. But I hope nonetheless you will find some merit in its pages, if only to tell the readers of Merlin—too few in number, I fear, to make an immediate impact—to what degree we feel your work is of major importance.

  Sincerely yours,

  Richard Seaver

  Next day I walked around the corner, armed with a copy of the magazine and the enclosed letter, entered the sanctum sanctorum of Les Éditions de Minuit, mounted the now-familiar stairs, and asked the same buxom lady behind the desk if I could see Monsieur Lindon.